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Object/terrain location data?

E

ethon

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us-ohio
Ok, here is the backstory:

I'm working on a project here at my University's Avionics Research Center, and we're going to try to use MSFSX for some data acquisition/sensor simulation applications. For this, we want to essentially grab the location and dimensions of 'hazards' or any objects/terrain that are around and within a certain distance (in a 360 degree FOV).

Specifically, what we want to look at is the terrain/objects that may be hazards to the aircraft on a landing attempt. Things like other aircrafts taxiing, ATC towers, power lines/towers/communication towers, wildlife, humans, etc.

Perferably, it would be great to get these data points as specific vertices of the objects (or just the object's location, and we can draw the object and vertices somehow ourselves), and their relative (to the plane) location or specific location on lat/long coordinate plane.

Can this be done through SimConnect at all? Or where else should I start my search.

I've gone through many threads through the search here on the forums and cannot find much that helps me out.

Thank you in advance for your help, and thank you for allowing me to ask this question as my first post on this forum. I'm sure I'll be around for a while :D
 
Last edited:
Hi,

No, SimConnect can not provide you with that amount of information about scenery objects. I don't even think you can get the location of static scenery objects, only for SimObject objects.
 
Hmmmm...I guess I could make dummy static SimObjects? Just got my copy of MSFSX Deluxe today at work. Have to wait until I get home to start tinkering around with it since I only have my MacBook at work (and no BootCamp/VMware Fusion since I installed Leopard).

Do you have any other ideas? Really I'd like to get world information out in a format we can use in MATLAB to do our simulations. I'd like to talk to you sometime if at all possible about some of this stuff. If you are ever on AIM, you can reach me there at TunaUnibomber , or I will send you a message if you get online and I'm around. I leave my AIM up 22.5/7 (or so), so just leave me a message.
 
Hi,

Maybe I would have to get a better impression of what you are trying to do, but how about processing the XML sources of the scenery offline to see where objects are? That might be the quickest way.

Feel free to contact me on AIM if you want to have a chat. Most of the days I will be online in the evening (European timezone).
 
Ok...after a week or so of working on this, I think I can provide some better information on what I'm trying to do.

Wrote this down on paper...just brainstorming.

1. Grab current location of aircraft (done this already in SimConnect)
2. Find all scenery/autogen (autogen if possible) objects within (x) radius of current aircraft location
3. Grab terrain mesh data/vertices within x radius
4. Break down above information into a useable format (XML ?)
5. Convert XML into vertex list? With their info in either "world latlonalt" or relative to the aircraft.
6. Construct world in MATLAB with this information to be able to use in Simulink modules.

Our simulink modules are essentially simulations of specific sensors mounted on our aircraft (FLIR, scanning laser, CCD, WxR, etc). So we want to create a world that we can run through Simulink to sim all these sensors and what they would theoretically return.

Hopefully this makes a little more sense now. It shouldn't really be that hard once I'm able to extract (all offline like you said Arno, doesn't have to be in real-time at all) the vertices off all the models and terrain around the aircraft.

Is there something in SimConnect that would tell me what models are current within a certain range of the aircraft?
 
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